tonx's demented ramblings

What is the best beer on planet Earth? 
Submitted by Remmy Van Hornie.

Might have to be Big Time's Bhagwans Best IPA.  Another contender is the "Contraband IPA" that Rogue does exclusively for the Hopvine in Seattle.  Bridgeport IPA will always be my comfort food. 

What are some charitable causes that you support or would like to support?

There are only two that I give dough to with regularity.  I tithe to Erowid, the vast and indespensible library of entheogen data.  They rather quietly do a tremendous amount of good work.

I kick down for a membership in EFF.  They are fighting many good fights and winning a lot of battles.

I'd love to support some sort of enviro/green/eco cause but I feel pretty cynical about the efficacy of most of the movement.  If there were a green advocacy organization as nimble, with the kind of brain trust and proactive tactics of an Electronic Frontier Foundation, I'd be happy.

What's on your Top 5 video games list?
Submitted by mileena.

Galaga and Centipede both scratched a similar itch for me - a sort of speedy obsessive fiending.

We Love Katamari for the PS2 owned my brain enough to be worth mentioning.  Almost as fun to watch as to play.

Halo owned my brain - the only first person shooter to do that.

Satans Hollow in the arcade - I've logged some hours on this.

Klax on the atari lynx was probably my favorite of the tetris style games.

As a kid I used to hang out at the arcade a lot.  The aesthetics of video games drew me and there was something enticingly transhuman in the gestalt of it, seeing the rapid evolution of the releases and imagining what marvels might be down the road.  I could miser out two bucks worth of quarters for a whole afternoon.

I'm cautious about letting myself get into videogames now and play them pretty rarely.  Their consciousness altering effects are of the flavor that I prefer only in small doses and I'll avoid any game that has a steep learning curve or a too open ended landscape. 

What's your method for calculating a tip?

$1 minimum for any beverage at any bar - alcohol or coffee.

20% or $2 per head (which ever is larger) at any place with table service.

Some moons ago there was an explosion of vox acitivity in my gmail inbox.  Some rush of folks I know or have some connection to adding me as a vox neighbor and whatnot.  It sort of slipped under my radar for a stretch so if I did not reciprocate somebody's linkage, its merely a sign of my sloppiness and poorly managed inbox.  Most of what I post here (there hasn't been a lot) I restrict to "friends and family" as it allows me to talk a bit more freely about the projects I'm working on, which are still under wraps.  If you feel you really must know more about the mundane workings of my life, perhaps its not too late for me to allow you under the gate.

Who is your favorite Muppet? Why?
QotD submitted by knitwitology.vox.com.

I'm not really into muppetry.  From an early age I thought there was something a little weird about adults speaking to children through puppets.  I had no trouble disappearing into fantasy as a kid but for whatever reason muppets never earned my suspension of disbelief.  I think I knew intuitively that they were really about training children and were proxies for the blandification conspiracy that clearly inhabited all the other hours of public television.

But as an adult (of sorts) I can kind of appreciate the whole Henson thing and I've had several friends with profound-to-pathological love for all things muppet.  Some of the Muppet Show stuff works really well and I think Sesame Street is quite cool, even if I didn't dig them as much as a kid.  But I find the Dark Crystal to be a cloying visual mess - like an oil on velvet painting that went a bit too crazy on the colors.  The crafting of psychedelia is often better left to those who actually partake of psychedelics.

Muppet

1 comment

I'm going to go out on a limb and say my favorite muppet is Chewbacca.  Because if Chewie aint a muppet than neither is Big Bird.

What's the strongest association you have between a scent and a memory?

I have a strong association with the smell of gasoline.  At age four I opened up the gas tank of a van on a hot day and got a face full of fuel.  In spite of this I actually really like the smell of gasoline and atop this childhood memory have a palimpsest of further gas memories, and the strong, comforting association with always being the passenger in automobiles and never the driver.  I've probably only even pumped gas once or twice in my life.

The strongest direct memory associations come from stuff I don't encounter too much - some psychoactive chemicals, food of my youth, the weird smells of dentist offices or hospitals, particular perfumes... encounters that manage to be simultaneously novel and deeply familiar like deja vu.

In cupping coffee I've discovered that I have a pretty good long term sense memory. I can recall the smell and taste of a coffee long after it was first encountered.   The harder part is parsing that flavor into some rational, descriptive components rather than just a gestalt.  Trying to apply a rich vocabulary to something that hits deep in the lizard part of the brain is a tricky game.

So this posting to "friends and family" only thing is nice, but realistically - how private is anything you post on another persons server?  In some future scenario ten years down the road when Six Apart is just the collective memories of a bunch of striped-shirts and all that remains of Vox is a cobwebby database of posts owned by some bank or data vulture, whose to say that my long post about how my favorite album cover is the one I snorted my first rail of ketamine off of doesn't end up directly associated with my credit report or NSA file?  Unless maybe it involves medical records, a "privacy policy" probably doesn't amount to much

I guess this is one of those info age questions that everyone asks at some point when they find themselves on the razors edge of converting some questionable part of their personal life into online social currency by blogging it.  But I wonder if I'm being a tad paranoid to think it appropriate to just assume that all that which seems semi-private now will one day be indexed on the google of the future?

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